Discussion Questions for Bogost's Persuasive Games




1. My rationale for suggesting a new rhetorical domain is the same one that motivates visual rhetoricians. Just as photography, motion graphics, moving images, and illustrations have become pervasive in contemporary society, so have computer hardware, software, and videogames. Just as visual rhetoricians argue that verbal and written rhetorics inadequately account for the unique properties of visual expression, so I argue that verbal, written, and visual rhetorics inadequately account for the unique properties of procedural expression.

-- Why isn't procedural rhetoric just called "logic"?



2. The McDonald’s Videogame mounts a procedural rhetoric about the necessity of corruption in the global fast food business, and the overwhelming temptation of greed, which leads to more corruption.
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The game makes a procedural argument about the inherent problems in the fast food industry, particularly the necessity of overstepping environmental and health-related boundaries. (31, emph throughout is mine)

-- Let's unpack Bogost's use of "inherent" here.  He's qualified his claim by saying that the game makes an "argument," yet there is an implied metaphysics (absolute truth) in the use of the word "inherent."  Are there arenas or causes that legitimate procedural rhetoric?  That is, does the cause have to be inherently arguable [according to some register of Bogost's] before procedural rhetoric can be detected?



3. Verbal rhetoric certainly supports this type of claim; one can explain the persuasive function of processes with language: consider my earlier explanation of the rhetoric of retail store return policies, or Eric Schlosser’s popular book and film Fast Food Nation, which addresses many of the issues represented in The McDonald’s Videogame. But these written media do not express their arguments procedurally; instead, they describe the processes at work in such systems with speech, writing, or images. (31)

-- Let's take the other side of this argument.  How is language procedural?  What are the rules of language?  How does language (written or spoken, with or without images) act like or become a game?  How is the experience of, say, Interactive Fiction different from a book?




4. However, Retouch does not deploy a procedural rhetoric, since it does not use representational processes to explain the actual processes used in photo retouching.
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But a procedural version of the same argument would facilitate a variety of different images, full-body, head-and- shoulders, different body types, and so forth.
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Unlike Retouch, Freaky Flakes asks the user to construct a box from the ground up, starting with its color.
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The argument Freaky Flakes mounts is more procedural than Retouch, but only incrementally so. The user recombines elements to configure a cereal box, but he chooses from a very small selection of individual configurations. ... The persuasion in Retouch reaches its apogee when the user sees the already attractive girl in the fake magazine ad turned into a spectacularly beautiful one. This gesture is a kind of visual enthymeme, in which the authors rely on the user’s instinctual and culturally mediated idea of beauty to produce actual arousal, jealousy, or self-doubt. Freaky Flakes offers no similar conclusion. The user creates a cereal box, but every box yields the same result (even combining the superhero and the princess ring yields the con- gratulatory message, “Your box looks great!”). A more effective procedural argument would enforce a set of rules akin to the tactics advertisers use to manipulate kids, while providing a much larger possibility space for box authorship. Within this space, the user would have the opportunity both to succeed and to fail in his attempt to manipulate the simulated children buying the cereal. (32-3)

-- Why isn't Retouch procedural?  What is Bogost's threshold for a digital artifact to use procedural rhetoric?




5. These propositions are every bit as logical as verbal arguments—in fact, internal consistency is often assured in computational arguments, since microprocessors and not human agents are in charge of their consistent execution. (36)

-- Talk about ways that "internal consistency" is not "assured" in a video game.  Take the example of discovering illegal opcodes in the 6502.  How do they mitigate the concept of internal consistency?  Whose agency is assured that consistency is maintained?  Do you know of unintended Easter Eggs in games? 




6. For example, in the case of Freaky Flakes, one might object that the underlying model for advertising influence presumes the media ecology of consumer capitalism. This is a reasonable objection; but such a wholesale revision might imply a different simulation entirely, one that would be outside the expressive domain of the artifact. However, procedural representations often do allow the user to mount procedural objections through configurations of the system itself.
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Just as an objection in a debate would take place during the negation or rebuttal of the opponent rather than in the construction of the proponent, so an objection in a procedural artifact may take place in a responding claim of a verbal, written, visual, or procedural form. Such objections are not disallowed by the Daisy ad or by Freaky Flakes; they merely require the interlocutor to construct a new claim in another context—for example a responding TV spot or software program.
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While the game does not provide the user with direct access to the search algorithms that generate its lists, so that a user could wage these objections in code, it does provide a flourishing community of conversation.
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The community discourse at the game’s message boards are not always related to objections to its underlying procedural rhetoric, but the availability of this forum facilitates active reconfiguration of the game’s rules and goals, a topic to which I will return in chapter 11. (37-40)

-- What are the ramifications of pushing audience response (and the measurement of persuasion) to other media?  Is the assumption that artifacts that argue procedurally may "merely [!] require the interlocutor to construct a new claim in another context" building an unfair hierarchy?  What sorts of responses to persuasive videogames gain traction?  What sorts of videogames have argued persuasively on a large scale?

What do these quotes tell us about

Additional Quote



7. This is what is most often meant when we say that computers are interactive. We mean they create an environment that is both procedural and participatory.” As Balance of the Planet suggests, procedural rhetorics do not necessarily demand sophisticated interactivity. But we might ask if procedural rhetorics benefit from sophisticated interactivity. (42)

For one part, videogames are among the most procedural of computational artifacts. All software runs code, but videogames tend to run more code, and also to do more with code. (44)

Videogames tend to demand a significant share of a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) resources while running; they are more procedural than other compu- tational artifacts. As I write this paragraph, my computer is running twelve major applications, including the active one, resource hog Microsoft Word, and some seventy total processes to run the machine’s underlying systems— window management, networking, graphics, audio, and so forth. Despite this immodest quantity of activity, my CPU remains 75–85 percent idle.

-- How does more CPU usage make for a more effective rhetoric?  What if Quake was written in assembly?  Compare to this quote from page 53:

Without realizing it, Salen and Zimmerman helpfully clarify the difference between Sutton-Smith’s rhetorics of play—the global, cultural roles for exploring themes like ownership and property—the procedural rhetoric of a game—the local argument The Landlord’s Game makes about taxation and property ownership (53).



8. Shuen-shing Lee explains such persuasion via Geoffrey R. Loftus and Elizabeth F. Loftus’s 1983 study Mind at Play:
[Mind at Play] sorts out two types of psychological configurations embedded in game design that aim to get players addicted to gaming. The first type, “partial reinforcement,” is that utilized by slot machines which spit out coins intermittently to reward a gambler. The experience of being occasionally rewarded often drives the gambler to continue inserting coins, in hopes of another win or even a jackpot. Arcade game designers have cloned the same reinforcement strategy in their games. Surprises such as score doubling, weapon upgrading, expedient level advancing may pop up randomly during the gaming process to heighten the player’s intrigue, stimulating con- tinued playing.
Partial reinforcement is certainly a type of persuasion, but the persuasion is entirely self-referential: its goal is to cause the player to continue playing, and in so doing to increase coin drop. (47)

-- Let's talk about partial reinforcement and the operation of quests in World of Warcraft.  WoW isn't exactly about "coin drop".  Why the [admittedly brilliant] partial reinforcement?  Explain the economics of partial reinforcement in WoW.




Extra:
For example, entering and exiting vehicles is afforded in GTAIII, but conversing with passersby is not (see chapter 3 for more on this subject). This is not a limitation of the game, but rather the very way it becomes procedurally expressive. Second, the interactivity afforded by the game’s coupling of player manipulations and gameplay effects is much nar- rower than the expressive space the game and the player subsequently create. The player performs a great deal of mental synthesis, filling the gap between subjectivity and game processes.
Previously, I have argued that the ontological position [the "nature of being"] of a videogame (or simulation, or procedural system) resides in the gap between rule-based representation and player subjectivity; I called this space the “simulation gap.” (43)





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ4qxnMODIU&feature=related